A man opens the LinkedIn social network app on his smartphone at the breakfast table in Berlin on July 5, 2024.
Alicia Windzio | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Every morning, Emily Ritter spends 15 minutes in bed checking her Instagram, Messages, Slack and Strava apps and playing The New York Times’ Connections and Strands games on her phone. Recently, LinkedIn has been part of the mix.
Ritter, a marketing executive at San Francisco-based startup Front, discovered a logic puzzle called Queens about two months ago through a promotion on LinkedIn, which is best known as the place where professionals connect and recruiters find talent.
“It’s just kind of a fun brainteaser,” Ritter said. “It’s a way to do something sort of relaxing, but in an engaging way.”
LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for $27 billion in 2016, rolled out its first three games in May, and Queens has emerged as the hottest of the trio.
On Tuesday, the company launches game number four, and it’s going deeper into logic puzzles with a title called Tango. In the game, a user is presented with a grid, and a few squares are filled in with a sun or a moon. It’s up to the player to fill in each remaining square with a sun or a moon, based on a few rules.
While LinkedIn consistently ranks as a top 100 app on iOS in the U.S., it’s below other social apps like TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and X as well as Meta services such as Facebook and Instagram, according to industry researcher Sensor Tower.
Games represent a form of content that, when done right, keep people coming back. And it’s a market that Microsoft knows well. The company introduced its first Xbox console in 2001, and now has a games business generating $22 billion in annual revenue following the purchase of Activision Blizzard a year ago.
Yet gaming wasn’t a part of LinkedIn for the first seven years after the acquisition, which was Microsoft’s biggest ever until the Activision deal. Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, says the games are designed to be played a little bit each day, perhaps when the day begins or as a short interlude between projects. Hopefully, they’ll spark conversations with colleagues and industry peers.
“You start with your game score and you move on to other areas,” Roth said.
It’s a familiar model. The New York Times offers eight games, and made a splash in the market in 2022 with the purchase of viral word game Wordle. The newspaper publisher saw tens of millions of new users and added subscribers after the acquisition.
LinkedIn, which generates revenue from recruiting services and advertising, isn’t planning to charge people to play its games, a spokesperson said. In the fiscal year that ended on June 30, LinkedIn generated $16 billion in revenue, or about 7% of Microsoft’s total.
The unit “continues to see accelerated member growth and record engagement,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts on the company’s July earnings call, months after membership crossed the 1 billion mark.
LinkedIn has been busy this year. It has built artificial intelligence features to help job seekers and students of its online courses. It’s been bringing a TikTok-like video tab to the LinkedIn mobile app.
And LinkedIn released its eighth annual list of the top 50 large companies to work at in the U.S.
Fun is a key part of the best workplaces, whether it be through banter, recreational sports or a happy hour, said Lakshman Somasundaram, the LinkedIn product management director who leads up games.
“It’s not just meetings and documents,” he said. “It’s important to us that LinkedIn reflects what the world’s best workplaces feel like.”
In September, LinkedIn surveyed around 900 members, and 83% said it was their favorite game the site offered, the spokesperson said.
Queens requires players to drop one crown emoji in each row and one in each column of a grid, a format that’s “a little bit sudoku-like,” said Thomas Snyder, the game’s architect. Snyder, a scientist formerly with Freenome and Adaptive Biotechnologies, won the 2018 World Puzzle Championship.
Joe Weinman, a former AT&T executive in New Jersey, has solved Queens for 46 days in a row. His streak would be at 90, but he forgot to play one day, he said in a LinkedIn message.
“I’d sooner give up my left arm than give up Queens,” he wrote, adding that he used to be on LinkedIn once a week.
And now there’s a place for Weinman and other addicts to congregate. In July Somasundaram started posting daily videos that reveal solutions to Queens puzzles on a dedicated page for the game. The videos garner hundreds of comments.
Somasundaram said he plans to produce videos about Tango.
Ritter has watched some of the Queens videos. She said she’s learned how to get through the puzzles relatively quickly.
“I guess I have just sort of figured out some of the tricks,” Ritter wrote in a LinkedIn message, adding that she would probably enjoy new challenging games.
When LinkedIn decided to launch a new logic game, employees came up with a few principles and brought them to Snyder. He sent back samples, and LinkedIn team members suggested additions, said LinkedIn games editor Paolo Pasco, who has constructed crossword puzzles for The New York Times.
In Tango, the objective is to get each row and column of the grid to have the same number of suns and moons. No more than two of a kind can be next to each other vertically or horizontally. An equal sign between two squares means the two must be the same, and an X between them requires the symbols to be opposites.
It’s a simple concept, but the puzzles get harder as the week progresses, just like The New York Times’ crossword puzzle.
LinkedIn promotes its games on its homepage and in the app’s My Network tab. But 40% of the people who play come in through a link, which might have been shared in a conversation or a post. After completing a game, LinkedIn makes it easy to copy your score and a link so you can send the information to connections or publish a post.
Between the links and the daily videos, people are coming back for more. LinkedIn’s App Store ranking tends to dip on the weekends, according to Sensor Tower, suggesting less usage when people aren’t at work.
“Professionals are playing games regularly, even on the weekends,” the spokesperson said.
Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk
Manuel Orbegozo | Chip Somodevilla | Reuters
After news broke on the last day of January that Meta might follow Elon Musk’s lead in exiting Delaware to incorporate in another state, Democratic Governor Matt Meyer sprung into action.
Delaware has long been the dominant state for U.S. companies to incorporate due to its flexible corporate code and expert judiciary. More than 20% of the state’s tax revenue, amounting to more than $1 billion a year, has historically come from corporate franchise fees, so state lawmakers can ill afford to preside over a mass exodus, or what’s been dubbed a “DExit.”
On Saturday, Feb. 1, a day after the Wall Street Journal published its story on Meta considering a Delaware departure, Gov. Meyer, who was brand new to the job, convened an online meeting with attorneys from law firms that have represented Meta, Musk, Tesla and others in shareholder disputes in the state, according to public records obtained by CNBC. Other attendees included members of the Delaware legislature.
The purpose of the meeting was to have a “Discussion re: Corporate Franchise,” one memo said.
The following day, records show, Meyer invited a second group to meet with him and new Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. That invitation went to Kate Kelly, Meta’s corporate secretary, and to Dan Sachs, the company’s senior national director of state and local policy.
The invite also went to James Honaker, an attorney with Morris Nichols, a firm that’s represented Meta in federal court in Delaware, and to William Chandler, former chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, who is now part of Wilson Sonsini’s Delaware litigation practice.
Roughly two weeks later, Delaware lawmakers were being asked to vote on a a bill, known as SB 21, that, if enacted, would overhaul the state’s corporate law in a manner that could favor Musk, Zuckerberg and other controlling shareholders of large companies.
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Among other things, SB21 would alter howcompanies can use independent directors to ensure the deals they’ve made will not be subject to court scrutiny, and would limit the records that shareholders can obtain from companies when investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty.
Late last week, the state Senate voted to pass an amended version of SB 21. If Delaware’s House of Representatives follows suit, in a vote expected as soon as Thursday, the bill would head to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.
That could remove a major overhang for Zuckerberg and Meta.
Meta has been the subject of “books and records” investigations in Delaware in recent months, according to two people directly involved in the matter who asked not to be named in order to discuss non-public investigations. Under current law, shareholders behind those probes could file cases alleging that Zuckerberg or other Meta directors caused billions of dollars in damages, according to the people and Delaware records viewed by CNBC.
If SB 21 passes, any claims filed after Feb. 17, the day the bill was brought to the assembly, would be considered under the new law. That means shareholders wouldn’t have the benefit of the current law, and investor protections that come with it, when their new claims are considered in Delaware court.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.
Mila Myles, a spokeswoman for Gov. Meyer, said in a statement that the governor has spent his first few weeks on the job meeting with “plaintiffs attorneys, Delaware corporate attorneys and countless Delaware incorporated companies,” adding that he is not “doing the bidding of any billionaire.”
Musk also became a top donor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and is now a lead adviser to his White House, running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Zuckerberg, who had a notably rocky relationship with Trump during the president’s first term, has been publicly currying favor this go-round. He’s taken measures like ending Meta’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, getting rid of third-party factcheckers in favor of a “Community Notes” model used by Musk’s X platform, and adding Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime friend of Trump, to his company’s board weeks before the new administration began.
Meta also agreed in January to pay $25 million to settle a four-year-old lawsuit over the company’s decision to suspend Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
News that Zuckerberg was considering a move out of Delaware landed a little over a week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, which the Meta CEO attended along with other tech leaders.
Mark Zuckerberg arrives before the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States takes place inside the Capitol Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.
Kenny Holston | Via Reuters
Meta hasn’t publicly commented on whether it plans to reincorporate outside of the state.
As CNBC previously reported, authors of SB 21 included Richards, Layton & Finger, a corporate defense firm that counts Musk and Tesla as clients. It was co-written by Delaware Law School professor Lawrence Hamermesh, as well as Chandler, the ex-chancellor, and former Delaware Supreme Court Justice Leo Strine.
Strine works for Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz, which is representing Zuckerberg in a separate matter tied to the company’s involvement in the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. In 2019, Meta agreed to pay a $5 billion fine to settle related charges with the FTC.
SB 21 was introduced to Delaware’s General Assembly on Feb. 17, by Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend, who had attended the first of the two meetings held by Gov. Meyer. The process of drafting the bill didn’t follow Delaware’s traditional practice of changing corporate law, which typically involves writing and review by the state’s bar association, and a committee within it called the Corporation Law Council.
Reforms outlined in SB 21 have been supported by corporate defense firms and attorneys, including those who helped draft the bill. They’ve been vociferously opposed by shareholders’ attorneys and investment groups, including CalPERS and ICGN, who say they want to ensure that controlling shareholders don’t make self-interested deals or decisions that go against the wishes and rights of the broader investor base.
On Feb. 2, Myles from the governor’s communications office shared a memo with legislators and attorneys who had attended the weekend meetings. It included a list of talking points in defense of SB21.
The memo, obtained by CNBC, said Delaware prides itself on serving as “home to the world’s leading companies,” having the “best law and jurisprudence” for businesses, and remains the “premier destination in America for business formation.”
“Whenever an entity — regardless of size — exits Delaware for one of our sister jurisdictions, our goal is to earn their business back,” the memo said. “In many cases, companies that reincorporate out of Delaware return to Delaware.”
Chinese tech company Tencent is a gaming giant and the parent company of WeChat, the ubiquitous social messaging app in China.
Cheng Xin | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Tencent on Wednesday posted a fourth-quarter beat on top and bottom line driven by a surge in gaming and advertising revenue.
Here’s how Tencent did in the fourth quarter of 2024 versus Refinitiv estimates:
Revenue: 172.4 billion Chinese yuan ($23.9 billion), versus 168.9 billion yuan expected.
Profit attributable to equity holders of the company: 51.3 billion yuan, compared with 46.03 billion yuan expected.
Revenue rose 11% year-on-year while profit was up 90% versus the same period in 2023.
Tencent is known as one of the world’s biggest gaming firms. Domestic games revenue in China rose 23% year-on-year to 33.2 billion yuan in the fourth quarter. Tencent said this hike was due to a low base in the prior year’s period, as well as growth in some of its hit games, including Honour of Kings and Peacekeeper Elite.
International games revenue jumped 15% year-on-year to 16 billion. Over the past few years, Tencent has stepped up efforts overseas with games like PUBG Mobile, as the domestic games market slowed amid macroeconomic and regulatory headwinds.
While Tencent is one of the world’s biggest gaming companies, the tech giant has also placed a large focus on becoming a key artificial intelligence player in China over the last two years, putting out various AI models.
On Tuesday, the company launched its Hunyuan3D-2.0 model which can turn text or images into 3D graphics. In February, Tencent had unveiled Turbo S, an AI model designed to answer user queries as quickly as possible.
Investors are still watching as to how Tencent plans to monetize its AI investments.
The Shenzhen-headquartered firm’s AI push is emblematic of the current state of competition among China’s tech giants, which has been spurred on by startup DeepSeek and its highly efficient artificial intelligence model that was released earlier this year.
AI updates have been released thick and fast from companies including Alibaba and Baidu.
Tencent is working with its own AI models as well as those of rivals. The company has its in-house AI chatbot called Yuanbao, which is based on its own Hunyuan foundational model as well as DeepSeek’s R1. Tencent has also sought to integrate DeepSeek’s technology across some of its other products, including WeChat’s search features in China.
The Wiz logo on a smartphone arranged in New York, US, on Tuesday, July 16, 2024.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Seven months ago, Alphabet lost a marquee case against the Biden administration’s Justice Department, which accused the company of maintaining an illegal monopoly in search. Weeks earlier, Google’s pursuit of cybersecurity vendor Wiz, in what would have been its largest deal ever, fizzled in part because of antitrust concerns.
With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Alphabet is back on the offensive.
Alphabet on Tuesday agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion in cash, almost $10 billion more than the proposed price in mid-2024, and said it expects the deal to close next year, subject to regulatory approvals.
Wiz will sit in Google’s cloud division, which is far from the company’s dominant search business. Google is behind Amazon and Microsoft in cloud infrastructure, a standing that would make the regulatory case against a tie-up challenging for any administration.
The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan was notoriously prickly with respect to tech deals, aggressively scuttling transactions in ways that frustrated even notable Democrat supporters like Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban. Google’s pursuit of Wiz may be the first big test for new FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, as the tech industry gauges how Trump 2.0 will treat the industry that houses the six biggest U.S. companies by market value.
“It’s going to be a great litmus test and bellwether for M&A in 2025,” said Brad Haller, senior partner for mergers and acquisitions at consulting firm West Monroe. “This happening relatively early on this year means it can be used as a measuring stick.”
As a venture-backed company, the deal would be a major windfall for Silicon Valley venture capital firms, which have struggled to generate returns since the initial public offering market mostly shut down in early 2022 and large M&A went dormant. After peaking at $780 billion in 2021, VC exit value plummeted to $89.2 billion the following year and to $71.6 billion in 2023, according to an October report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. In the third quarter of 2024, the number hit a five-quarter low.
“Large acquisition strategy is back on the menu for VC-backed companies,” Haller said.
Index Ventures is the largest outside investor in Wiz, followed by firms including Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and Cyberstarts.
In walking away from a deal with Google in July, Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport wrote in a memo to employees that the company would instead pursue an IPO. There are some signs that the IPO market is heating up, as artificial intelligence infrastructure company CoreWeave, digital health startup Hinge Health and buy now, pay later lender Klarna have all filed prospectuses recently with the SEC.
Economic uncertainty represents the biggest headwind, as President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on top trading partners like China, Mexico and Canada, as well as massive cuts in government spending, have led to extreme market volatility and raised concerns about business and consumer confidence. The Nasdaq is on pace for its fifth straight weekly drop and worst quarterly performance since 2022.
For Google, the allure of acquiring Wiz appears to be worth the potential regulatory risk. Reuters reported, citing a source, that Wiz agreed to a termination fee of over $3.2 billion, which the publication called “one of the highest fees in M&A history.”
Google declined to comment.
Founded in 2020 Wiz hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue after just 18 months. The company’s cloud security products include prevention, active detection and response, and they’ve become increasingly essential as rapid advancements in AI have made attacks more sophisticated and potentially more damaging.
“That price tag tells us that Google was almost desperate to boost its security bona fides before the adoption of AI gathers even more speed,” Gordon Haskett analysts wrote in a Tuesday note.
Google said in a statement on Tuesday announcing the deal that, “The increased role of AI, and adoption of cloud services, have dramatically changed the security landscape for customers, making cybersecurity increasingly important in defending against emergent risks and protecting national security.”
In Wiz’s blog post, Rappaport said that, “Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs.”
The deal will face regulatory scrutiny, but “Google, in our view, would have a stronger case compared to consumer-focused acquisitions,” analysts at Bank of America wrote in a note after the announcement. The firm said Google has less than 15% of the cloud services market.
For Microsoft to eventually close its $69 billion acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard in late 2023, the company had to endure a 21-month battle with regulators, including an injunction effort by the FTC. The agency also sued to block Meta’s acquisition of virtual reality company Within, though a California district court scuttled the FTC’s efforts.
Beyond dealmaking challenges, Meta, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have all been accused of monopolistic practices by either the Justice Department or the FTC. In Google’s case, both agencies pursued actions.
Khan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in January that she hoped the incoming Trump administration wouldn’t let Amazon and Meta off the hook from pending antitrust suits with a “sweetheart deal.” Her comments came after numerous tech execs and companies, including Google, pledged money towards Trump’s inauguration fund.
Ferguson has suggested that his FTC will keep a keen eye on tech, though he hasn’t offered much by way of specifics. During Trump’s first administration, the president had a particularly hostile relationship with the industry, routinely slamming Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, notably for his ownership of The Washington Post, as well as taking aim at Meta and Google for their alleged biases towards his administration.
Those former foes have made extra efforts to change the tone this time around, whether that means ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs or trekking to Washington for Trump’s inauguration after previously making visits to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
In an interview on “Squawk Box” last week, Ferguson said “Big Tech is one of the main priorities” of the administration.
“President Trump appointed me to protect Americans in the marketplace,” Ferguson said. “And I’ve said since day one, Big Tech is one of our main priorities, and that remains true.”
Jonathan Kanter, former assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s antitrust division under Biden, said on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Tuesday that a hefty regulatory review is likely on the way for the Google-Wiz deal. He said it’s not just about Google’s position in cloud, but also the amount of data the company controls.
“I don’t think the Wiz deal is going to ease on down the road to quick approval,” said Kanter, who is now a CNBC contributor. “It’s going to be a long road. They’re going to have to look at a lot of documents, a lot of data and understand whether it’s really going to entrench Google’s market power in a lot of different markets.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.